I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog! -Emily Dickinson

Saturday, 19 November 2011

CHERNOBYL HAPPY FACE

Really great things about chemo:

1. No matter how ditzy or forgetful you get, you can claim “chemo
fog.” Legitimately, most of the time.

2. Cake. That your best friend brings when you whine, “I’m
out of cake.”

3. Smoking. That you still really, really want to…but the smell
alone would make you throw up. (Subtitled: Cancer: the most successful smoking cessation plan in the world.)

4. Not shaving your legs. Or anything else.

5. Sleeping like a Neanderthal. A few hours here, a few
hours there…in-between foraging for cake and reading at 4:00 a.m.

6. Steroids. An excellent experiment to determine what it would
be like to be dangerously psychotic.

7. Tea. I used to hate tea. Two years ago, my friends, Mark
& Audrey, gave me a tin of what they described as the best tea in the world
– Kusmi Tea from Paris.
“A Russian blend of China, Ceylon and India teas with scents of bergamot,
orange and mandarin.”

Ahhhh. The tin (a beautiful treasure in itself) remained
sealed until chemo – when my taste buds declared that coffee was a drink skimmed
from stagnant tailing ponds. I now declare Kusmi Tea to be the crack cocaine of all
teas.